The Real Wonder Woman

According to Wikipedia Wonder Woman was created by psychologist William Moulton Marston (aka Charles Moulton), and Marston's wife Elizabeth and their life partner Olive Byrne are credited as being his inspiration for the character's appearance. The problem is that this is largely based on the movie about Marston that focused almost exclusively on his wife and mistress. But in 2014 Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air asked author Jill Lepore about her book The Secret History of Wonder Woman and Vargas pinup girls appear to be the inspiration for her appearance, but the essence of who Wonder Woman is was based on Margaret Sanger: “His vision for Wonder Woman reflected his interest in the women's suffrage movement and in Margaret Sanger, the birth control and women’s rights activist who also happened to be his mistress’s aunt.”

GROSS: And in terms of the story line, Marston hired Joy Hummel to help write “Wonder Woman.” And Marston's mistress, Olive, gave her one book and told her read this and you'll know how to write “Wonder Woman.” And that book was…

LEPORE: Margaret Sanger's "Woman And The New Race."

Margaret Sanger was such a vocal pain in the ass to Congress that she was threatened with a prison sentence for being a mouthy woman. Her sister had to continue her advocacy, but she was no longer allowed to speak her mind about women's right to vote, or their right to family planning, which is why Marston had Wonder Woman advocate for women's rights and run for president, but also why Wonder Woman was often depicted as being gagged, because Margaret Sanger was gagged by Congress and the Comstock Act.

The other interesting titbit is that while living a life where he hid his lifelong affair with Olive, essentially being a polygamist with 2 wives, he invented the lie detector and became the leading authority on how to use it, ironic since he was hiding a lie, but either way Wonder Woman has a golden lasso that forces people to tell the truth because Marston invented the lie detector.

So it turns out that the founder of Planned Parenthood is the inspiration for Wonder Woman, not Olive or Marston’s wife, but Olive’s Aunt Margaret. The story goes much deeper, and my own research has led me to understand that Margaret Sanger was an Obstetric Nurse and one of the most vocal proponents in the United States for a women's right to vote and to have birth control, and after fleeing to Europe and checking out their birth control she returned to the US in 1915 and went to trial in 1916 to defend her right to distribute cervical dams as well as information about birth control, considered pornography under the Comstock Act. She founded the precursor to Planned Parenthood in 1916 after winning at trial, though Comstock continued to block her freedom of speech every time she wrote a magazine article. Sanger specifically created Planned Parenthood to distribute contraception in the form of cervical dams, and then later condoms, and to distribute information because she was sick of seeing women lined up in alleys to get abortions, and in her autobiography told the story of a woman that died in her arms after an infection caused by a second, “self-abortion,” that year.

During the entire time she was alive Planned Parenthood never performed a single abortion because Planned Parenthood was created by Margaret Sanger to prevent abortions. Then just a few years after her death in 1966 a New York State Planned Parenthood performed their first abortion, and in 1973 Roe v Wade passed and now Planned Parenthood is considered an, “abortion clinic.” Margaret Sanger is rolling in her grave, they took her anti-abortion organization and turned it into an abortion clinic. Margaret Sanger, Marston's aunt through common law marriage is the real Wonder Woman who got women the right to vote and the right to use contraception, and saved untold millions of fetuses from being aborted by putting the power of contraception and family planning in the hands of women, who previously had no other option but to get life threatening back alley abortions if they couldn't afford another mouth to feed.

For the first 50 years from 1916 until Sanger’s death in 1966 Planned Parenthood’s sole purpose was to prevent abortions, so no abortions were performed by them. Then in the last 50 years since Roe v Wade passed 63 million abortions have been performed in the United States, with Planned Parenthood currently responsible for about 35% of them. And when the Supreme Court kicked abortion back down to the states in 2022 with Dobbs 14 states banned abortion, and 7 more limited it based on gestational limits, but rather than decreasing, abortions actually increased in 2023 to over 1 million for the first time in a decade.